Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
There’s a narrative that Democrats are adrift or, at the very minimum, bereft of obvious leaders. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries aren’t very popular, and none of the 2028 contenders seem, outside of redistricting brawler Gavin Newsom, to stir the blood all that much. Yet after Tuesday night, there’s much for Democrats to celebrate. Virtually every election result, from New Jersey to Virginia to Georgia to California, was exceedingly good for them. Every faction of the party could exult in the outcomes: Leftists got their new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and moderates spiked the football over the ascensions of Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Virtually all Democrats were thrilled that Proposition 50 passed in California, allowing Newsom to oversee a Democratic gerrymander that can counter the Texas GOP’s. There are plenty of similarities between 2025 and 2017, another strong off-year for Democrats that foreshadowed the blue wave of 2018.
The greater reality, which even chest-thumping Democrats may not want to acknowledge just yet, is that MAGA is in twilight. In the days before his inauguration, Donald Trump was actually liked by a majority of Americans. He had won a popular-vote election, and voters were largely disillusioned with all the Democrats had to offer, whether it was Joe Biden slipping into senility or milquetoast Kamala Harris. While MAGA will never quite believe it, they will probably never have it as good again as they did in January 2025. Americans had given Trump a second chance. Enough of them earnestly believed he was going to address the cost-of-living crisis and begin to make their lives better.
As disorienting and terrifying and overwhelming as second term Trump has been, the elections on Tuesday demonstrated the fundamental — and likely unfixable — flaw of the entire MAGA movement. It revolves fully around Trump and can only thrive if he sits at the top of the ticket. And since it is so deeply tied to one man, his failures undercut whatever populist realignment they believed was possible at the close of 2024. Today, Trump is unpopular, with most polls showing a significant dip since the start of the year. During his first term as president, and again as a candidate over the last several years, he was a trusted voice on the economy because he was a businessman who once presided, through luck, over an era of low inflation. That economic edge is now gone. The tariff regime is alienating, housing and grocery prices remain stubbornly high, and Trump has given little indication he cares about — or can focus on — this affordability problem. Americans wanted a tighter border, not marauding, maniacal ICE agents in their streets, and almost no one asked for DOGE, National Guard invasions, or furious crackdowns on free speech. Again and again, Trump and his most vicious cronies, including Stephen Miller, have tried to manufacture crises to justify all of this gross federal overreach.
It’s obvious enough that most Americans aren’t buying it. They’re sick of Trump and weary of what MAGA stands for. And for the many rank-and-file Republicans who have hitched their wagons to Trump over the last decade, a new reality is settling in: Trump, in fact, isn’t eternal. It’s always possible that Trump, in his 80s, decides to violate the Constitution and seek a third term, but that seems to be growing more unlikely, if Trump’s own public pronouncements are to be believed. For younger Republicans, there is very much life after Trump, and they’re going to have to start contemplating it — especially as the Supreme Court readies to potentially invalidate his tariffs and the odds of Democrats storming to a House majority in 2027 keep increasing. Republicans are still favored to hold the Senate, and Trump will be the most powerful man in the world for another three years. But no matter who his successor is — J.D. Vance is most likely, followed by Marco Rubio — none of them are him. Trump’s charisma fused the disparate factions of MAGA and kept a great deal of peace within the Republican tent. When he exits the scene, there will be a bloody contest for the future of the movement and the Republican Party itself.
Still in full control of the federal government for at least another year, Trump and his MAGA allies can exert themselves plenty. They can keep bullying Democrat-run cities, harassing college students, and terrorizing immigrants. They can indulge their autocratic fantasies. What they can’t do is force Americans to like any of it. The old fascist regimes, or even the Bush-Cheney post-9/11 regency, had — at least in the beginning — a great deal of popular buy-in. The masses collectively yearned for that style of punishing leadership. Trump won a popular vote by less than two points and has governed like he was delivered a far greater mandate. He squandered whatever goodwill he had with the public, and MAGA’s future is now much murkier than it was a year ago.
The final dark question is how Trump will exit the scene. Scenarios of an illegal presidential run or an attempted seizure of power must be entertained, as well as the possibility of Vance, or another Republican, trying to steal an election in the event of a loss. As unlikely as it is, Trump could try to declare martial law and somehow cancel elections. With him, everything is on the table. The saving grace, in the end, might be federalism — it’s the states and counties that control election apparatuses, not the president — and MAGA’s deficit of competence. Full-blown autocracy is very hard to implement. As the days tick down in 2025, Trump may be finally understanding this.
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